The names mean nothing to me

As driving goes, I find it quite a pleasant experience, especially if I have few things to figure out in my mind. But one thing I do find incredibly frustrating are the road names, letters and numbers mean nothing to me and I go completely blank whenever anyone gives me directions that contain road names and numbers. It is a good job that the drivers of Same Day Courier Manchester firm http://allaboutfreight.co.uk/same-day-courier-service/same-day-courier-manchester otherwise your parcels would never get delivered.

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I did think that perhaps give the main roads names like we do our street names would be a good idea until I stumbled across an article about street names. It seems that the letters and numbers that are used on our A roads and motorways actually do serve a purpose.

There are just short of 800,000 roads across the UK that have street names. That’s a lot of names to think of. It’s no wonder that they get used over and over again, with the most common one being ‘High Street’ with over 2,400 of them here in the UK. The next most common names include:

Station Road – 2,023

Church Lane – 1,868

Church Street – 1,521

Mill Lane – 1,318

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The endings of street names differ sometimes depending on where the road leads and recent statistics show that 61% of the names end in ‘Road’, 15% in ‘Close’, 10% in ‘Street’, 8% in ‘Lane’ and 6% in ‘Avenue’. Milton Keynes is a good example of way the ending ‘Road’ has been omitted. It is thought that as little as 4% of all the names end in ‘Road’. When the towns road infrastructure was established back in the 1960s it was decided early on that the grid system of roads would have the horizontal roads ending in ‘Way’ and e vertical roads ending in ‘Street’. There are however today many more named close, place and drive.

When you visit Scotland perhaps for a business meeting or perhaps a nice holiday you will notice that they are big fans of the street name ending ‘Place’. Over 10% of the roads in the larger cities of Dundee, Aberdeen, Glasgow and Edinburgh end with ‘Place’. This also shows a geographic difference in the names of road with northern cities tending to use street rather than road, with southern cities having virtually no names ending in street.

Perhaps my thought of giving all roads names is not such a good idea!

Author: Kei Taylor

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